One Track Memory: Echo & the Bunnymen's "Never Stop" (July 1983)

Bricklayers for Bono, pizzicato pluckiness, and kissing music for goths

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“Pizzicato” is a brilliant word, with three plosives around a double-z, and a vowel for each. It’s balance is beautiful, and so is the sound of a well-plucked string. It’s derived from the Italian “pizzicare” (piz‧zi‧cà‧re), for pinch or pluck.

My pop life in pizzicato commences with Echo and the Bunnymen’s “Never Stop” (1983). The track opens with 10 beats of bow work on cello, a rest, and is joined by the syncopated tapping of a bow on another cello, just above the bridge. The first pizzicato triplet of many comes next, and drummer Pete Freitas takes over the pulse with plenty of kick drum and gated snare drum.

“Never Stop” first appears on the 1983 EP Echo and the Bunnymen (US: April 1983).¹ The EP appears two months after Porcupine, a classic front-loaded album from the cinemascopic sound club of the great white north—which also included Big Country and the sometimes messianic Simple Minds and U2, arch enemy of the Bunnymen (“Music for plumbers and bricklayers,” quipped lead singer Ian McCulloch—a.k.a. “Mac the Mouth.”)²

         Mac on guitar, in sweatshirt from Jennifer Beals. Drawing by @deathbydisco_  

“Never Stop” is a pulsing steam engine of a track, but with plenty of space to breathe. There’s the start-and-halt rest in the first few seconds. The strings alone at 0:50, which segue to guitar and marimbas. On McCulloch’s opening line, he channels a disdain worthy of the crusty Norman Thayer, Henry Fonda’s character in On Golden Pond.³ Who better, I figure, to take the piss out of the Thatcherites, as well as McCulloch’s fellow pop stars?

“Good Gahd,” he said,
“Is that the only thing you care about?
“Splitting up the money
“And share it out?”

In the next verse, McCulloch clarifies that “he” is the speaking subject here, taking the Lord’s name in vain, with a cigarette lighter in one hand and a can of petrol in the other.

All the simple stuff never understood
Like right from bad and wrong from good—
Deny: that you were ever tempted by the Lie
That there is an answer in the sky

For McCulloch, the brilliance of “Never Stop” heralded the Bunnymen’s Ocean Rain (May 1984), which was advertised in the UK as “The Greatest Album Ever Made.”

McCulloch: “All the time people [kept] writing, ‘Oh the Bunnymen, they've dried up,’ and all the time we kept coming back. Ocean Rain was totally calculated, I wanted strings and acoustics, cos we were being lumped in with U2 and Simple Minds and there was people on our backs to be like them. And so we did Ocean Rain to prove that we were nothing to do with that, even though it meant we'd never be as big as them.”

Simon Reynolds, Melody Maker: “Didn’t you describe it at the time as kissing music?”

McCulloch: “Probably. Sodding, stroking the dog music, it doesn't really matter.”⁴

It mattered to me. At ages 16 to 17, on my way to every first date and second date (there were few third dates), behind the wheel of my 1969 Olds Cutlass, I cued up “Never Stop” on my Sears Dashmate cassette deck to calm my nerves. The signal-to-noise ratio was awful, but the signal itself was clear: mystery abounds.

Measure by measure, drop by drop
And pound for pound, we're taking stock
Of all the treasures still unlocked
The love you found must never stop

This is it! I thought. Park the car. Exhale slowly. Press my feet firmly against the fog glistened asphalt. Tap the little tub of Blistex Lip Conditioner in my front left pocket. And smile. Again and again.

What else could a poor boy do?

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                           Click image for song.link to “Never Stop (Discotheque)”  

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Notes

1. The EP is also known as The Sound of Echo.

2. Ken Sweeney. “Echo And the Bonomen,” The Irish Sun, October 20, 2018. https://www.thesun.ie/tvandshowbiz/3281737/echo-bunnymen-u2-bono-feud/. Last accessed July 20, 2024.

3. Ian McCulloch and Will Sergeant. “Crystal Days: A Commentary.” From the liner notes of Echo and the Bunnymen, Crystal Days, 1979-1999 (Los Angeles: Rhino), 2001.

4. Simon Reynolds. “Lips Like Sugar.” Melody Maker. September 30, 1989. @ https://archivedmusicpress.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/simon-reynolds-interviews-ian-mccolluch-part-1-30th-sept-1989.jpg. Last accessed June 14, 2024.